Around a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti’s 1934 Cube stands apart for many as atypical of the Swiss artist, the only abstract sculptural work in a wide oeuvre that otherwise had as its objective the exploration of reality. With The Cube and the Face, renowned French art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman has conducted a careful analysis of Cube, consulting the artist’s sketches, etchings, texts, and other sculptural works in the years just before and after Cube was created. Cube, he finds, is indeed exceptional—a work without clear stylistic kinship to the works that came before or after it. At the same time, Didi-Huberman shows, Cube marks the transition between the artist’s surrealist and realist phases and contains many elements of Giacometti’s aesthetic consciousness, including his interest in dimensionality, the relation of the body to geometry, and the portrait—or what Didi-Huberman terms “abstract anthropomorphism.” Drawing on Freud, Bataille, Leiris, and others whom Giacometti counted as influences, Didi-Huberman presents fans and collectors of Giacometti’s art with a new approach to transitional work.

Content

9–10

Note

11–14

Buried Face

15–23

Face of the Orientation that Cannot Be Found

25–35

Face of the Drawing that Seeks its Volume

37–41

Face of the Cage and the Transparent Crystal

43–48

Face of the Bodies that Come Apart

49–62

Face of the Impossible Dimension

63–85

Face of the Dead Heads

87–101

Lost Face, Face of the Father

103–121

Face of Opacity and the Blind Crystal

123–131

Face of Shadow and Spacing

133–136

Melancholic Face

137–145

Face of the Drawing that Seeks its Notch

147–156

Face for Finishing with the Object

157–198

Buried Face

199–224

Notes

225–245

In the Face of the Unface

247

Credits

sculpture

art theory

face

art history

abstract art

surrealism

melancholy

Alberto Giacometti

“A spiral-shaped investigation of Giacometti’s work revolving around various readings of one of his sculptures … Didi-Huberman exploits the formal presence of Cube to construct a metaphoric and polyphonic interplay of critical facets which allows him to engage with a range of Giacometti’s aesthetical investigations.” Timothy Mathews, excerpt from Alberto Giacometti: The Art of Relation.

studied Art History, Cinema and TV-Studies and Philosophy at Ruhr-University Bochum. After being a doctoral researcher at the DFG research training group ›Identity and Difference‹ at Trier University she finished her PhD thesis about »Signatures of Alterity« at the Brunswick University of Art. 2011–2013 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the DFG research training group ›Visibility and Visualisation. Hybrid Forms of Pictorial Knowledge‹ at Potsdam. Her research is about aesthetic thinking, Drawing/Distortions (Verzeichnungen), signatures, theories of authorship, alterity, visual thinking.

is a postdoctoral research fellow in the DFG-project “Rhythm and Projection” at the Institute of General and Comparative Literature at Free University in Berlin and free curator. She wrote her dissertation on Sensuous Thinking in Sergei Eisenstein’s theory project Method. She has published various articles on Soviet Cinema, forms of visual thinking, practices of montage and the relations between literature, ethnology, art and science. Together with Marie Rebecchi she curated the exhibition on “Sergei Eisenstein: The Anthropology of Rhythm” at Nomas Foundation, Rome.